Err on the side of generosity

I’m often a bit suspicious of edicts to assume good intentions—while themselves well-intentioned, it’s too easy for those guidelines to cut off consideration of harms, whether they were intended or not. At the same time, intentions do matter, and a culture that defaults to a presumption of malice is not one that can survive for long. So I quite like the framing in this article from Kim Fellner about organizational resilience: she writes, “Err on the side of generosity. Assume reciprocal good will for as long as you possibly can.” This reframes the old instruction in two useful ways: first, it positions good will as an element of being generous; and second, it’s honest about the fact that any such generosity will have reasonable limits. The latter holds open some space to address real harms, when they inevitably come up, without letting intentions get in the way. (Lots of other great advice also in this piece, which is written in the context of movement organizations, but has a lot to say about other kinds of orgs, too, I think.)